The 2025 championships were held in Canada from March 29 to April 6. Come this time next year, the championships will be at the same Weber County Ice Sheet where the club practices, contests league matches and hosts curling teaching events.

The Ice Sheet is, of course, no stranger to marquee curling events, having hosted the sport in the 2002 Winter Olympics.

“Right over there,” club member Lucinda Tutterow said, pointing to the 2,300-capacity Olympic-sized arena in the Weber County Ice Sheet, “is where curling took place.”

“The club as a whole is just excited. We’re just so thrilled to have it come back,” she said.

To say club members are ecstatic about the championships coming to Ogden would be an understatement.

Think about it: The best men’s players of an Olympic sport will be curling in the same spot that about 50 club members do for several months out of the year, and they’ll do it a little more than a month following the 2026 Winter Olympics.

“For our local curling community, this is huge. It’s second only to getting the Olympics here, really,” club member Burke Baker said. “It’s the best in the world coming here, and you’re able to see them without having to travel to Italy and pay Olympic prices. You get to see them right in your own backyard.”

Curling usually sees increased interest throughout the United States after the Olympics. Tutterow herself started curling right after the 2010 Olympics and met her husband, Ben Womack, through curling tournaments.

For those unfamiliar, curling is the sport where teams of four people slide granite stones on ice and try to strategically place them as close as possible to the center of a bullseye, which is more than 100 feet away.

The sport appears to have existed in some form for hundreds of years, originating in Scotland, but wasn’t made an Olympic medal sport until 1998. Exact numbers on curling participation across the United States are difficult to track down; anecdotally speaking, however, the sport has grown exponentially in popularity since the 2000s.

The Ogden Curling Club was founded in 1998 in advance of the 2002 Winter Olympics and is one of four curling clubs in Utah. It has about 50 members, and that number has fluctuated over the years.

The club puts on community events, including “Learn to Curl” where people can come in and learn the sport. It also hosts a tournament once per year and leagues for its members in the fall and spring.

“Right now (curling is) a lot more popular than it was,” club member Mike Dellos said. “We’ve had up years and down years, especially when you’re gonna have … an Olympic event, that’s when all of a sudden everyone starts coming out and we start doing a lot of learn-to-curls, so we teach a lot of people. Some of them actually stay and play, it’s pretty cool.”

Dellos began curling right after the 2002 Olympics, another one of the many across the country who’ve done so.

The club has two Learn to Curl events upcoming at the Ice Sheet: on April 24 and May 1, both from 6:45 to 8:45 p.m.